Silicon Valley loves passive aggressive solutions. These work well when no one has the power to challenge you on them but they're incredibly flimsy once those opposed get a bit of leverage. Those who have pushed this type of behavior will quickly fold when forced to go toe-to-toe in actual conflict. It is a huge tell of one's spinelessness.
They aren't doing this though, it is just a Republican fever dream talking point that they're not getting the engagement they think they should have, or people unfollowing them because they're toxic. They're free to post what they want, but also free to risk being banned if they're posting harmful content.
> Those who have pushed this type of behavior will quickly fold when forced to go toe-to-toe in actual conflict.
“toe-to-toe in actual combat”? WTF does this refer to? Rolling up on Twitter HQ in F150s with pintle-mounted machine guns?
I mean, I think—irrespective of whether the particular policy is “passive-aggressive” or not—most people involved in deciding content policies are, yes, not particularly interested in defending them “toe-to-toe in actual combat”. I am not sure why you think that's surprising; if someone offered to escalate a dispute about my coding decisions to actual combat, I’d choose not to engage if practical, too.
I wish the article spent more time explaining why the Chesterton's fence even exists. Fake news, trolling, etc require disproportionate effort to counteract with logic and reason. In essence its a denial of service attack. A troll can leave an inflammatory and distracting thread, at no cost to the disruptive power of the thread, to create another while the debate still rages on the old one tying up resources and attention.
Yeah, the premise that "shadowbanning is the problem" betrays an unwillingness to perform root cause analysis. Nobody thinks shadowbanning in and of itself is desirable. Turn off shadowbanning, and all the problems that shadowbanning was helping to tamp down roar back.
> In essence its a denial of service attack.
Exactly. Free-reach absolutism prevents exercise of free speech by those set upon by the unmoderated mob.
The author himself doesn’t do much in addressing the root cause. He admits
>” What makes shadowbanning so tricky is that in some cases, in my view, it is a necessary evil. Internet users are creative, and bad actors learn from informed content moderation”
Yet follows through with a proposal for more transparency, without addressing the contradictions inherent in his position.
If shadowbanning was actually a big problem than people would expose it in a heartbeat through browser extensions that attempted to read your posts using a different identity. I’ve been shadowbanned before, most of the time by an overzealous spam filter, your own “junk” folder is literally works through “shadowbanning”. Usually I notice almost instantly if I’ve been shadowbanned since it’s pretty apparent when engagement with you drops to zero.
Shadowbanning on a social media website is nothing more than a simple deception and it’s neither all that effective or all that menacing and I do wonder why people are so obsessed with the idea.
Perhaps I'm a bit nutty about this, but I feel like shadowbanning is a contract violation. The social media company takes our words and promises to distribute them. But for some people it doesn't follow through.
The implicit trade is that we create content for them and they sell ads to keep the lights on. But if they're not following through on their half of the bargain, I think they should be upfront about it. THe "shadow" part seems like fraud to me.
> I feel like shadowbanning is a contract violation. The social media company takes our words and promises to distribute them. But for some people it doesn't follow through.
Could you cite such a contract or terms and conditions that states that the platform agrees to distribute whatever content that we as users want to distribute. I am not aware of any mainstream ones that does. There are however crypto based platforms that make censorship impossible or hard, but they are not mainstream
Shadowbanning is a symptom, not the disease. The scale at which these large social networks run have so much power to influence our perception of the world. If any bias, let alone major lopsided political bias, is involved in judging who doesn't get a say in this modern "town square", then we are in big trouble. Not to mention gaming of this system via bots and bad faith state actors.
Perhaps a contrarian voice, I really like the feature. For the most part I agree with the shadowban choices made on comments and accounts. There's only so much outrage and drama and shallow trolling that I want to see on HN pages.
I am not a troll and a flamer - unlike many users, I'm real and I participate in this community since its baby steps (March 16, 2007)! Your opinion of entirely subjective and you
seem to only want to hear a resonance of your own voice - that's not truth seeking, and definitely not a civil discourse!
High karma users of HN can choose to see posts of shadow banned users, and when they do they often help the user get unshadowbanned or in the case of some users it's very clear why this person was shadow banned.
My ban is on severely rate-limited comments. I can't participate in discussions, because, according to HN, my comments are "low quality", but instead of showing me that's the reason, they make it look like some error. Until I reached out to them, I really thought something's wrong with HN. If you're gonna restrict people, at least be honest about it and let people know! Meanwhile, many commenters use obvious throwaway accounts, which is not being penalized at all.
I don't mind the rate limiting personally. I think it's good for my mental health. I do wish I knew how many posts I had left though so I didn't waste the last one. There have been too many high quality comments on subjects I'm very familiar with and professionally involved in that I've had to throw away.
I agree, but, discussions don't last forever, so, if I chose to participate and can't respond in time, I am simply locked out of participation and this hurts my mental health more, not less. Sometimes people ask me to clarify things and I simply can't! How is this contributing to the quality of comments they pretend to strive for? If my comments are low quality, they will get downvoted and hidden! Isn't this the mechanism to automatically fight low quality comments?! Why add yet another layer on top of it, which is entirely subjective as my comments could be poor in one discussion, but great in another - I'm restricted from both though!
